December, 2017

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The Ultimate Guide to Relationship Selling

Hubspot Sales

What is relationship selling? Relationship sellers prioritize their connection with the customer over all other aspects of the sale. They develop trust -- usually by adding value and spending a lot of time with prospects -- before attempting to close. “Relationship selling is essential if you have a high average selling price (ASP),” explains VidScale COO Adam Rizika.

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How to avoid accidental complexity in software design

Nutshell

“There are two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.” —  Leon Bambrick. In 1986, computer architect Fred Brooks published a paper called “ No Silver Bullet ,” in which he observed that software engineering wasn’t producing the same productivity gains compared to hardware engineering. Brooks argued that when it comes to making software, there were two major barriers to overcome: accidental complexity and essential complexity.

Software 121
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10 Causes of High Sales Rep Turnover – Which One Is Yours?

SBI Growth

By now you know some of the sales people that won’t be with you next year. But, which of your A-Players are planning to leave after they get their bonus? This post gives you some factors that may predict the.

Sales 106
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Managing and scaling an outbound sales team

PandaDoc

If outbound sales works for your company and product, it can be a powerful way to grow your business. Outbound sales is low cost, forecastable, relevant to almost any industry, from tech sales to small local businesses, and most importantly, almost infinitely scalable. Meaning that because you aren’t relying on inbound leads, you have the entire universe of prospects to call on.

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AI Strategies for Sales Managers: How to Cut Down on Tedious Admin Work

What if you could help your sellers stop wasting 72% of their day on non-selling activities and focus on bringing in revenue? Incorporating AI in your enablement workflows can help you cut down on busy work, get projects done faster, and let your team (and you!) focus on making a bigger impact. We put together this guide to show you how to use AI to cut time and costs for projects, including collateral creation, development of training videos, and automating tedious processes.

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34 Million Data Points Show What Type of Sales Content Performs Best

Openview

At the top of the funnel, marketers obsess over attracting, capturing, and handing off qualified leads. At the bottom of the funnel, sellers fixate over deals won and revenue attained. But what about the middle of the funnel? It’s easily the most ignored – but, arguably, the most important – stage in any sales pipeline. The middle of the funnel is where relationships with prospects are built, and where reps learn what obstacles need to be overcome.

Sales 95
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21 Bold Predictions for Sales in 2018

The Center for Sales Strategy

Here at the Center for Sales Strategy, we are constantly asked to look at sales, sales management, and sales marketing trends, and to make predictions about what the landscape might look like in the future. At the end of each year, we make what we consider to be our bold predictions for the following year. This year, several people from our team participated.

Sales 94

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Will You Build Your Relationships in 2018?

Engage Selling

Is your sales team doing enough to build their current relationships? When you close a sale with a new client, you create a new relationship that needs to be nurtured.

Sales 81
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Are You on the Leading Edge of Sales Operations?

SBI Growth

Leading Sales Operations is an extremely challenging role. It requires a blend of strategic thinking, process improvement, data analytics and sales acumen. Consider the rapid evolution of Sales Operations, barely a recognized discipline 25 years ago. What was cutting edge five.

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Expert advice: 17 resume tips for sales reps

Nutshell

Sales reps drive profits and overall success in nearly every industry, but truly talented salespeople are a rare commodity. Still, even if you’re a born salesman , don’t assume you can waltz right into any open position. While your skills might put you at the front of the pack, you still need a stellar resume to get noticed. To help us learn what works and what doesn’t in a sales resume, we spoke to Certified Personnel Consultant (CPC) and resume guru Melanie Diotte , the Chief Recruitment Offic

Sales 79
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Sales Leaders, Here’s How To Have A Great Sales Kickoff in 2018

Openview

I once attended a sales kickoff that was a big waste of time. This particular company whisked away our entire sales department to a tropical location without putting together any structured agenda. They thought leaving our days open to brainstorm as a group was a good plan of action. When in fact, it turned into a whole lot of kicking back, but not much kicking off.

Sales 89
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2024, The Year of the Customer

2023's struggles fueled a shift: companies are ditching wasteful strategies in favor of data and AI-powered growth. Enter 2024, the year GTC takes center stage. Discover 5 ways a customer-centric approach unlocks new revenue and delivers lasting success.

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5 CTAs Secretly Sabotaging Your Sales Emails + More

The Center for Sales Strategy

We hope you've had a great week! It's Friday, and today we're sharing what we've been reading online this week! Here are our "best" from around the web. 1. 5 CTAs Secretly Sabotaging Your Sales Emails (& What to Use Instead) — HubSpot. Every call-to-action matters. Ask for the right things in the right way, and your relationships with prospects will grow stronger over time.

Sales 87
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6 Soft Skills Every Salesperson Needs to Get Ahead

Hubspot Sales

To know how successful a salesperson is, just look at their numbers. Understanding why they’re succeeding is trickier. In sales, success is a reflection of two things: The strength of their hard skills and the strength of their soft skills. What are soft skills in sales? Unlike hard selling skills, which are relatively easy to teach and measure, soft skills are "fuzzy.

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Be a Stand-Out Seller: Method 2 – Process

Engage Selling

So far in this series, we’ve looked at how you can apply the hard-earned wisdom of top sales professionals who thrive in crowded, commodity-driven markets and apply it to any organization—even yours.

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Marketing Leadership: Top 10 B2B Marketing Articles of 2017

SBI Growth

What’s unique about this top 10 list? We segmented our subscribers by marketing leadership. This is a top 10 list of the most viewed articles by Chief Marketing Officers and VP’s of Marketing. How Top CMOs Quantify Marketing Investment with.

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How to Stay Competitive in the Evolving State of Martech

Marketing technology is essential for B2B marketers to stay competitive in a rapidly changing digital landscape — and with 53% of marketers experiencing legacy technology issues and limitations, they’re researching innovations to expand and refine their technology stacks. To help practitioners keep up with the rapidly evolving martech landscape, this special report will discuss: How practitioners are integrating technologies and systems to encourage information-sharing between departments and pr

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17 Sales Tips On How To Progress To Close The Sale

MTD Sales Training

When getting to the closing of a sale, salespeople often start to feel nervous because they feel they may get a rejection or they are putting the buyer under some pressure. So they hold back in asking for the order, or project a nervous attitude so the buyer wonders if they are really making the right decision. Here are some tips that will help you when you get to this important point in the sale. 1) Don’t think of the close as a close !

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5 crucial elements of an executive summary

PandaDoc

Any successful and well-structured business proposal or business plan should include an executive summary. This section can take many forms, lengths, and writing styles. What is an executive summary? An executive summary is, by its very nature, a summarization of information. Serving as an introduction to a proposal, the executive summary often contains brief statements describing what will be further detailed in the coming proposal.

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What You Can Change Today to Increase Sales Performance Tomorrow

The Center for Sales Strategy

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”. I would bet, like the rest of us, you learned this Golden Rule in Kindergarten and you were probably raised to believe you should always treat others as you would want to be treated. It sounds great in theory, and I applaud your kindness and compassion, but make no mistake, the Golden Rule does not work when developing people.

Sales 87
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Identifying Sales Prospects: Gatekeepers, Influencers, and Decision Makers

Hubspot Sales

Today’s salespeople need to know more about their prospects before conducting outreach. And, chances are, they’ll need to know someone other than the decision maker pretty well. In days of old, salespeople could call the C-suite, marketing could email them, and it was much easier to gain access to the decision maker. Now, C-suites can isolate themselves with caller ID, email filters, and assistants.

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1st, 2nd, and 3rd Party Intent Data: Which Is Right for You?

How do 1st, 2nd, and 3rd party intent data compare? 1st, 2nd, and 3rd party data each have specific advantages and disadvantages. It comes down to four factors: accuracy, cost, control and quantity. This infographic explains the pros and cons of each and helps you understand which one is best for meeting your business objectives. Intent data can be a great way to fill your pipeline and close more deals.

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How Sales Should Respond to the Board of Directors

Openview

The Board of Directors serves an incredible purpose in organizations: they provide council, they instruct, and of course, they apply pressure and ask some (very) tough questions. For sales leaders, those questions can be extremely daunting. Many times, the answers lie in post-it notes or in Word doc blue sheets, are buried deep in Salesforce reports, or are based on hunches or anecdotes from conversations with sales professionals.

Sales 71
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How to Generate More Recurring Revenue

SBI Growth

Our guest today is Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight, the global technology leader in the customer success category. Many CEOs are moving their revenue models to recurring revenue. Why? This type of revenue creates higher enterprise value than transaction-level revenue. As.

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In A Sales Slump? Here Are 7 Ways To Boost Your Confidence & Motivation

MTD Sales Training

It happens to us all. Even though you are doing the same things that you were doing when sales were up, you enter that phase where nothing closes, no-one wants to talk to you and the competition start taking over. It can be enough to drive you to depression. But it needn’t. Here are some tips that will improve your motivation and drive when things aren’t going according to plan. 1) Remember that ‘motivation’ is temporary.

Sales 72
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How Enterprises Can Collaborate Effectively with Startups

Planview

How can we effectively collaborate with startups? That’s a question that routinely comes up at many of the conferences Spigit hosts and attends as well as in our day-to-day conversations with Fortune 500 companies. Why should enterprises collaborate with startups? There are several reasons, including: Access to startups working on newer technologies (i.e. blockchain).

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How to Leverage Intent Data for Better Outcomes

Speaker: Susan Spencer, Principal of Spencer Communications

Intent signal data can go a long way toward shortening sales cycles and closing more deals. The challenge is deciding which is the best type of intent data to help your company meet its sales and marketing goals. In this webinar, Susan Spencer, fractional CMO and principal of Spencer Communications, will unpack the differences between contact-level and company-level intent signals.

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Five Ways To Get More Case Studies

The Center for Sales Strategy

A lmost everywhere I go I hear managers and salespeople say, “Yeah, case studies are very valuable. We need to get more case studies.” So why don’t more sales operations have more case studies? What’s holding them back? I can tell you what prevents most sales teams from having enough case studies: Case studies require some level of client participation.

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The 8 Skills Salespeople Will Need to Be Successful in 2018

Hubspot Sales

Selling Skills 2018. Video skills. Ability to be honest. Tech savviness. Framing skills. Challenger selling. Knowledge of Data Analysis. EQ. Product expertise. Imagine you wake up in 1958. Your job title hasn’t changed -- you’re still a salesperson, sales manager, sales director, etc. -- but of course, everything else has. Buyers are different; they don’t have the internet to guide their decisions.

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5 Steps of Rapid Preparation for Negotiation Success

RAIN Group

"Unfortunately, there seems to be far more opportunity out there than ability. We should remember that good fortune often happens when opportunity meets with preparation.". Thomas A. Edison. Preparation is often the greatest determinant of negotiation success. Across negotiation studies and surveys, we see sellers who get the best outcomes: know what they sell, research buyer wants and needs through sources other than the buyer, have a keen understanding of the buyer's day-to-day life and concer

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How to Identify the Top 1% of Sales Talent

SBI Growth

As a CEO, being able to hit your quarterly revenue projections predictably is paramount to your success. Knowing that you will make your number quarter-after-quarter, and year-after-year starts with the talent of your team. If you get the talent equation.

Sales 84
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The 2023 Supply Chain Crystal Ball: Challenges and Solutions

Speaker: Olivia Montgomery, Associate Principal Supply Chain Analyst

Curious to know how your peers are navigating ongoing disruption? The supply chain management techniques that dominated the last 30 years are no longer supporting consumer behavior or logistics and manufacturing capabilities. So what’s working now? What should your plans for 2023 include? By researching the supply chain challenges and solutions that businesses – especially small and midsize businesses – are currently experiencing, we’ve learned what’s working and what’s not.

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33 Sales Tip & Techniques

MTD Sales Training

Here are 33 tips and techniques that I believe will help every salesperson to improve their overall sales figures and create more motivation and drive. Take a look and let me know what your favourites are, and what other tips you would share with others. 1) Focus on what you can control , not on what you can’t. That focus will drive you forward instead of holding you back. 2) Invest in continual development of your skills, attitudes and abilities.

Sales 67
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Performance Starts with Taking Care of Yourself | Sales Strategies

Engage Selling

I want to have a quick conversation with you about something that often doesn’t get discussed when we’re talking to sellers, top performers, and sales leaders. It’s a mandatory discussion that we have to have on a regular basis.

Sales 65
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"Follow Up Next Week" Does Not Mean You Have an Appointment

The Center for Sales Strategy

One of the leading indicators for sales success is to look at the number of appointments that a salesperson has each week. (This is not the only leading indicator that you should be looking at, but it is one of them.) The idea is that if a salesperson has a significant amount of appointments each week which involve finding needs, getting assignments, presenting solutions, or delivering a proposal, that this quality sales activity will lead to good solid revenue performance.

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Are Extroverts or Introverts Better Salespeople?

Hubspot Sales

Hiring salespeople is a high-stakes game. The cost of a bad sales hire can average from $25,000 to $50,000, not to mention the less quantifiable damage to team morale and culture. Conventional wisdom suggests that extroverts -- commonly thought of as outgoing and sociable -- would make better salespeople than introverts, who have been popularly represented as awkward in social situations.

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How to Prove Marketing Value: Demonstrate Content ROI and Contribution to Sales

Every marketer knows how important it is to prove their efforts drive sales opportunities, but that’s easier said than done. When problems like sales and marketing misalignment, lack of data, and wasted efforts persist, marketers can’t measure, prove, or increase their impact on revenue at a time when demonstrating marketing value is critical. Using analyst and expert data, this guide to marketing impact and content attribution explains: How B2B buyers use content The most common types of conten